Running and Riding from Belper in the Peak District, mostly with my Fuji XT10

Tuesday, 3 November 2015

Peak Raid 3h. Round 2, Glossop & Bleaklow, Joint 2nd

It's been a while since I've done a Mini MM Nav event, so a gap in the diary was very quickly filled with this great looking event. It looked perfect for me as it ;

* Was in Winter, so conditions could be bad (ie great running!)

* Had a top quality map (as it's organised by the guys behind Peel Land Surveys) and

* The course goes over high level open access land, so running would be hard.

Nathan and Chris from the club had expressed an interest in getting into Nav style events, so Nathan and me decided to head up for this and enter as a pair so that he could get an insight into tactics and nav practice.

As it happened, the day turned out to be the warmest ever recorded in November and so navigation was never really a problem, although bearings were taken on several controls (especially 14 to the all important 15 which was 70 pts).

After we got the map, we headed straight off - making route choice whilst running up the road. We wanted to have lots of route choice at the end (to fine tune the time at the end as every minute back loses 50pts!) so we decided to leave the top left of the map to the end where we could add on or remove controls as time permitted.

Small Nav errors at 11 (wrong stream!) and 8 (overshot the stream junction) and 3 (the quarry was a nightmare!) lost us about 10 minutes all in which with hindsight would have been enough for us to add on control 5 which was 20 points.

All in all - a great day out - challenging course, hard running, great views, a great results, good nav practice and a great intro for Nathan. Great fun!